The FSCONS people recently uploaded the video recordings of the talks which were done in the last edition. Among these there is a GNU recutilstalk which introduces the concepts implemented by recutils and provides an overview of the rec format and the utilities.

As a novelty, this is the first recording of a recutils introductory talk where you can actually read what is written in the slides :)

Also make sure to take a look to the other videos! Lots of interesting stuff, as is usual in the FSCONS conference.

GNU recutils is a set of tools and libraries to access
human-editable,
text-based databases called recfiles. The data is stored as a
sequence of records, each record containing an arbitrary
number of
named fields. Advanced capabilities usually found in other data
storage systems are supported by GNU recutils: data types, data
integrity (keys, mandatory fields, etc) as well as the
ability of
records to refer to other records (sort of foreign keys).
Despite its
simplicity, recfiles can be used to store medium-sized
databases.

GNU Recutils is a set of tools and libraries to access
simple human-editable, text-based databases called
recfiles. recfiles contain data structured as a
sequence of records, and support data integrity as well as
the ability of record fields to refer to other records.

Despite its simplicity, recfiles can be used to store
medium-sized databases that you can either edit with your
favorite text editor (i.e. Emacs) or access with automated
scripts using the recutils.

The GNU recutils suite comprises:

A Texinfo manual describing the Rec format and the
software.

A C library (librec) providing a rich set of functions
to access rec files.

A set of C utilities (recinf, recset, recins, recdel,
recset and recfix) that can be used in shell scripts and in
the command line to operate on rec files.

An Emacs mode (rec-mode).

The current status of the package is:

The library is implemented.

The utilities are implemented.

The manual needs some more work.

The Emacs mode needs more work.

Before to make the first release we have to fix the manual
and to complete the rec-mode Emacs mode, as well as to
implement support for internationalization (with gettext) in
both the library and the utilities.

Both the Savannah project
(http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/recutils) and the homepage
(http://www.gnu.org/software/recutils) are in place now.

If you are interested in collaborating in the development of
recutils, please write to the development mailing list:
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-recutils.

Note that we are not only interested in people contributing
with code, but also with ideas and documentation. The rec
format is young and is suitable to all kind of improvements.

A very nice feature of this analyzer is that it is not intrusive with
the development procedures of our packages. It does not require the
maintainer to implement any extra logic in the build system. A
provided 'scan-build' script is able to "intercept" the calls to the
GNU compiler on source files, and internally invokes the analyzer.

For example:

$ scan-build -o DIR gcc -o foo foo.c

executes the compilation command to build 'foo' and then runs the static
analyzer in the foo.c source file. An html report containing the
results of the analysis is created in the directory 'DIR'. The report
is generated only if some bug is detected. The generated html report
is quite readable, clearly marking the execution paths leading to
errors.

The parameter to 'scan-build' can be any command, so in order to analyze
the code of a typical GNU package we could launch:

As an example you can take a look to the report generated from the
analysis of the GNU PDF library here. The report is automatically
generated in a daily period as part of our effort in continuous
integration (there are pointers to more generated reports in the
"Quality" section of the library development page if you are
interested).

You can find another example of a generated report, this time for
libxml2, here.

Many thanks to Jim Meyering for pointing out the existence of this
analyzer. He said: ''If you're not using its "scan-build" tool, then
start. Right now. Really. It's that good.''

A very nice feature of this analyzer is that it is not intrusive with
the development procedures of our packages. It does not require the
maintainer to implement any extra logic in the build system. A
provided 'scan-build' script is able to "intercept" the calls to the
GNU compiler on source files, and internally invokes the analyzer.

For example:

$ scan-build -o DIR gcc -o foo foo.c

executes the compilation command to build 'foo' and then runs the static
analyzer in the foo.c source file. An html report containing the
results of the analysis is created in the directory 'DIR'. The report
is generated only if some bug is detected. The generated html report
is quite readable, clearly marking the execution paths leading to
errors.

The parameter to 'scan-build' can be any command, so in order to analyze
the code of a typical GNU package we could launch:

As an example you can take a look to the report generated from the
analysis of the GNU PDF library here. The report is automatically
generated in a daily period as part of our effort in continuous
integration (there are pointers to more generated reports in the
"Quality" section of the library development page if you are
interested).

You can find another example of a generated report, this time for
libxml2, here.

Many thanks to Jim Meyering for pointing out the existence of this
analyzer. He said: ''If you're not using its "scan-build" tool, then
start. Right now. Really. It's that good.''

The most important public Radio-Television entity in Spain, RTVE,
maintains a web portal where they publish a lot of audio material.

Unfortunately, the audio format used in that site is MP3. It is well
known that the MP3 format is cumbered with several software patents
owned by both the Fraunhofer Institute and Thompson. It is a shame how
a public entity like RTVE is harming the fundamental rights of the
Spanish citizens by promoting the use of an audio format that imposes
restrictions.

Fortunately, there is an initiative to ask RTVE to publish the audio
contents in the free OggVorbis format. There is an open thread in the
"Suggestions" section of the RTVE forum. We are asking the people to
left a comment there asking RTVE to publish their contents using
OggVorbis.

After reading about Social DNS I finally decided to create a
go://jemarch domain for this website. Social DNS seems to be a
quite interesting distributed, internationalized and
non-organization-controlled alternative to DNS, despite it seems to be
in its first stages.

There is a plugin for Firefox to browse the go: domains. I am
looking forward for w3m support for Social DNS (why to open a Firefox
if you can comfortably browse the web using Emacs? ;)).

Surprising enough I got a bug report for JemPkg from my friend
Thales. He was trying to run JemPkg 0.0.3 without success, since there
is a stupid bug in the first 20 lines of the source files that
prevents emacs to successful load the program.

So I just fixed the stupid bug and uploaded a new version: JemPkg
0.0.4.